Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things

Harvard University Press, Published 2015. Hardcover, 324 pp.; 24 cm; first printing (so stated); illustrated with black-and-white figures, maps, and diagrams. In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Blue cloth-covered boards, silver lettering on spine; mild shelf wear and edgewear to covers, binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket with light bumping to edges and mild shelf wear. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Examines the place of war in the history of knowledge, arguing that with the Napoleonic Wars chance became the basic operative principle of history. Ranging across military theory, literature, philosophy, cartography, mathematics, and pedagogy, Engberg-Pedersen charts the shift in the thinking of war around 1800, when the state of war was recast as an epistemic regime of chance events, contingencies, and probabilities, and traces the maps, games, and simulations devised to manage it, with readings of Clausewitz alongside the realist novels of Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. Contents: Introduction: The Prism of War; The Geometry of War: Siege Architecture and Narrative Form; State of War 1800: Topography and Chance; Modus Operandi: On Touch, Tact, and Tactics; Exercising Judgment: Technologies of Experience; Paper Empires: Military Cartography and the Management of Space; The Poetics of War: Cartography and the Realist Novel; Conclusion: The Disorder of Things; Notes; Acknowledgments; Index. Title: Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things Author Name: Anders Engberg-Pedersen ISBN Number: 067496764X ISBN-13: 9780674967649 Location Published: Cambridge, Harvard University Press: 2015 Binding: Hardcover Book Condition: Very Good Jacket Condition: Very Good Size: 24 cm Type: Hardcover Categories: History, Military Seller ID: 20260624002 Keywords: cartography, clausewitz, history of knowledge, military history, napoleonic wars